In terms of appetite-whetting inducements to visit a new restaurant, the phrase, “Haven’t you heard? The chef’s Icelandic!” ranks somewhere between, “This is the restaurant where Britney Spears always holds her wedding breakfasts,” and, “Mick Hucknall, who’s a regular here, often stands up in the middle of his dinner and serenades fellow diners with his favourite Simply Red songs.”

Icelandic? Is Iceland very famous for its cuisine? What kind of food do they actually eat there? Moose? Yes, maybe moose. But a moose isn’t food, it’s a cross between a donkey and a hat rack. According to Iceland’s official tourist website, seafood and mountain lamb are big. Icelanders also do a version of haggis, apparently. But, the guide adds, “For those with nerves of steel and stomachs of iron, the menu for the Thorri midwinter feast is a real challenge. Delicacies there include some quite indelicate cuts of meat, including boiled sheep’s head (on the bone or pressed), ram’s testicles pickled in whey, and loin bags.” Oh yes, and “Rotten shark, cured by burying… if you manage to get it past your nose, you’re halfway there.”

All of which poses just two questions. The first is: if this is what the locals say to try to entice tourists to visit Iceland, what do they say when they want to discourage them? The second is: what is a loin bag? Do they stock them in the Reykjavik branch of Mulberry?

Have you been to Iceland? No, me neither. So maybe visiting a restaurant where the chef is Icelandic would be a good way to test the water. You know, like visiting a dry-ski slope in Britain before committing yourself to the full expense of a trip to Courchevel dressed in an outfit made of such lurid fabric that other skiers have to wear tinted goggles to deflect the glare. An Indian entrepreneur has just had a similar idea, offering Indians a chance to board an Airbus 300 in Delhi that never actually takes off. His customers don’t want to go anywhere. But the 99 per cent of Indians who’ve never experienced air travel are happy to pay him £2 to experience what it’s like to sit in a plane, buckle up, witness how much smiley enthusiasm the flight attendants can muster to perform the safety procedure for the 4,769th time in their lives, and to wrestle with one of the great dilemmas of life: the chicken or the fish?

Actually, eating out is not so different from sampling the flavour of air travel by sitting on a stationary plane while flight attendants bustle up and down the aisles trying to sell you loopy gadgets from the in-flight gift shop catalogue, things you’d never consider buying in conditions where your brain was receiving its full, regular supply of oxygen. In an Indian, Chinese or Thai restaurant you are transported, for a couple of hours, to Bombay, Shanghai or Bangkok – an inauthentic taste of those countries, sure, yet still more authentic than sitting at home with a supermarket heat-and-serve curry balanced on your lap.

The chef at Texture, Agnar Sverrisson, comes from Iceland. But the only evidence of this on the menu is a main course of Icelandic cod and another of Icelandic lamb – or, as the menu puts it, “Icelandic Lamb (from Skagafjordur)”, as if maybe diners who would be dithering over the Icelandic lamb option would be persuaded to go ahead upon seeing the lamb’s provenance. (Though for all I know Skagafjordur might not be a quaint mountain region where the sheep bleat melodically all day,

like Bjork, but rather the name of an Icelandic supermarket chain, like Lidl, say. It’s possible that Skagafjordur lamb is the Icelandic equivalent of a modest foodstuff such as Twiglets, Jaffa Cakes or baked beans, and rather than being a gastronomic delicacy, Skagafjordur lamb is cherished simply because it carries a Proustian resonance for expatriate Icelanders. I still couldn’t tell you, because I didn’t order the Skagafjordur lamb.)

The nationality of the food at Texture is what people call “modern European”; that is, it’s not the recognised cuisine of any European country. Unless there’s a European country where people come home from work and rustle up a dinner combining teasing permutations of exotic ingredients, laid out on large plates amid dramatic smears and droplets of this and that, as if Miro were overseeing the dishing up, and where there was always enough extra in the pot to feed an unexpected guest, such as a Michelin inspector.

“Modern European” is fantasy food, a cuisine without frontiers that, in theory, captures something that the tried-and-trusted cooking of any individual European country lacks, while also occasionally forsaking its cosiness, familiarity and charm. A sort of gastronomic Esperanto.

Texture’s is a very serious menu, softened by the relaxed – albeit swishly designed – room, and by the discreet friendliness of the waiting staff in general and of Xavier Rousset, in particular. Rousset is Sverrisson’s partner in this new enterprise. They worked together at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Rousset as sommelier, Sverrisson as head chef.

This is serious food; the sort of food you’re worried you might be tested on at the end of the meal to ascertain if you are worthy of the chef’s culinary skills. But, unlike a lot of flamboyantly precise modern European cooking, it is also quite a pleasure to eat. There are the familiar frills of Michelin-ambitious restaurants – Parmesan wafers, curled slivers of toasted baguette, roasted cod skin, served alongside some wasabi emulsion and a yoghurt and herb dip; then, later, “a small welcome from our kitchen” of a shot-glass of celeriac foam with hazelnuts and raisins. Also a wine list as long as Ulysses, with some entries priced at about the same as a Ulysses first edition. Then again, a request for tap water rather than bottled was met without a fuss or a sneer, and when I asked Monsieur Rousset to suggest a wine at the cheaper end of the range, he enthusiastically recommended a Faugères – not loose-change-cheap at £27.50, but one-tenth, even one-twentieth of the price of some of the bottles on the list.

A starter of tomato and artichoke textures summed up the kitchen’s style. Here was a tomato served up five ways: confit; roasted; raw; dried in a coaster-sized disc as thin as a banknote with an improbably intense flavour of, well, tomato; and some fashionable tomato-flavoured ice. The cost is all in the effort taken, not in the ingredients. Scottish scallops, served with cauliflower slivers and purées, had a depth of flavour that scallops sometimes lack. In one of Hemingway’s favourite haunts in Madrid, they serve suckling pig straight out of the oven to swooning diners. Here, two dominoes of Lancashire suckling pig are dolled up with baby cabbage, a large postage stamp of squid, a chewing-gum-sized strip of soy jelly and bonito sauce. Black-leg chicken came with yet more wasabi emulsion. Emulsions you find only in “modern European” restaurants and in Dulux paint tins. It all works well enough. But you have to concentrate.

One of our puddings was a chocolate ganache with cardamom ice cream, fennel and (are you ready?) olive oil. The other was lemongrass and ginger soup – yes, soup! Have you never had soup for pudding? – with bits of mango and passion fruit sorbet and what looked like a small onion. This is not exactly casual dining. Nor are the prices all that casual, though they are not out of kilter with the field. A three-course menu runs to £45, with two taster menus at £55 and £59. OK, so the chef’s Icelandic. Maybe he, like 80 per cent of Icelanders, believes elves exist (I’m quoting again from the official Iceland tourist site). But Britney and Mick Hucknall are nowhere to be seen. You’d pay good money for that any day of the week, wouldn’t you?

Texture, 34 Portman Square, London W1 (020-7224 0028, www.texture-restaurant.co.uk). Giles Coren is away

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